Tag: Office Furniture Logistics

Air freight transhipped via the Middle East could be disrupted after several countries decided to cut air, sea, land and diplomatic ties with Qatar.

Saudia Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, Yemen and Libya have all announced a break-off in ties with Qatar over its continued support of Muslim Brotherhood and its relationship with Iran.

All three major Gulf airlines will be affected – the most serious impact will be felt by Qatar Airways, which will be unable to fly to these countries, which have shut their airspace to it. The move is likely to result in longer flight times for Qatar Airways, as well as higher fuel bills.

Qatar Airways has published a short note on its website, but did not comment further. It said: “Qatar Airways has suspended all flights to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia until 23:59 UTC on 5 June (2.59am, 6 June, Doha time).”

It advised customers with an existing cargo booking to call the nearest QR office.

While it only notes the suspension to Saudia Arabia, the UAE and other countries are expected to be added to the list.

Emirates, Etihad, Saudia, Gulf Airways, flyDubai and Air Arabia announced they would suspend all flights to and from Doha from 6 June, “as instructed by the UAE government”, noted Emirates. Etihad will upgrade its aircraft on the route to a 777 for the last few flights.

Etihad Cargo said in a statement: “All customers who have cargo booked on Etihad flights to and from Doha are being provided with alternative options and will be contacted directly regarding their specific requirements. Should you have any concerns about specific shipments, please contact your local Etihad Cargo office or alternatively our dedicated customer service team can be contacted 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“All other Etihad Cargo flights, including to the rest of the Middle East, are operating as normal. Any further changes to the status of flight schedules to Doha will be communicated through the appropriate channels. Etihad Cargo regrets any inconvenience caused as a result of the suspension.”

Qatar is fairly reliant on both the UAE and Saudi Arabia for its imports. About half of its food is sourced in the Middle East, primarily from the UAE, which also accounts for most of its fruit and vegetables. The UAE accounts for some $2.76bn of its imports, and is Qatar’s fifth biggest import country. Much of the country’s poultry and dairy products come from Saudi Arabia.

Qatar’s only land border crossing with Saudi Arabia, at Abu Samra, sees about 800 lorries cross the border each day.

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A new window film from Designtex takes its cues from science fiction.

Open offices are privacy nightmares, especially if you’re trying to hide sensitive data on screens. But since open offices aren’t going away any time soon, there’s Casper: a new product from the applied materials company Designtex that works like a cloaking device.

When applied to a glass wall or a window, Casper blacks out screens behind it. The transparent window film blocks light waves transmitted through LCD and LED screens. This makes them look like they’re turned off. Everything else in the room looks completely normal. While privacy screens have existed for laptops and individual monitors for quite sometime, Casper brings it to the architectural scale. It’s like a Romulan cloaking device come to life.

A young Fort Worth architecture firm is about to put its design mark on the city.

Soon, Matthijs and Jie Melchiors, partners and founders of MEL/ARCH studio, will start construction on a three-story office building made entirely of shipping containers. In all, 40 containers of various colors will be used. It’s expected to be completed in October.

In all, the building will have space for 30 businesses. There will also be a break room, restrooms and common areas.

The building will be 15,000 square feet, with each office about 160 square feet. The containers are 8 feet by 20 feet, but they are 12 inches taller than the typical container size.

The building will have solar panels on the roof and tree sculptures on an outdoor deck that are really wind turbines that will generate supplemental power to the building.

Clerkenwell Design Week (CDW) in London has become one of the premiere events on the contract furnishings calendar. It is one of the few exhibitions held in the world that fulfills its promise of delivering the architecture and design community. The breakdown of who attends CDW is telling: Of the 60,000 or so visitors from 72 countries, 88% are architects and designers.

In many ways, CDW is more like the events surrounding iSaloni than a traditional furnishings show. In addition to furniture and furnishings — new products are launched here — visitors to CDW will find art installations, programming and a lot of parties.

Bellow Press, publishers of Business of Furniture and Workplaces magazine, and Independent Overseas Market Support are organizing the first ever North American Commercial Interiors Exhibit at Clerkenwell Design Week 2017. The exhibit will be curated by Bellow Press to show off the most innovative products North America has to offer the world.

“What struck me as I wandered around from permanent showrooms and temporary exhibitions was the absence of many of the most innovative North American commercial interiors companies.” says Rob Kirkbride, editor-in-chief at Bellow Press. “It is a shame, because designers I spoke to are very interested in specifying North American brands. The designs that are dreamt up in Clerkenwell spawn projects around the world, and the designers simply have no connection to the best from North America.”

The North American Exhibit will be as unique as the event itself. Those chosen to show at CDW 2017 will pick a single product to exhibit, one that focuses on innovation. For a low all inclusive cost, the product will be shipped to London from Independent’s Chicago hub, displayed on a professionally designed stand in a prime show location with other complimentary North American manufacturers, included in a pre-show CDW guide published in Business of Furniture and Workplaces magazines (along with a complimentary full page ad) and promoted heavily by show organizers. There will also be a North American themed party, think craft beer and BBQ.

Many small and mid-sized North American companies may have never done business overseas or even considered it. If needed, the organizers of the North American Exhibit have partner companies that can help to follow up on sales leads and projects in London and around the world – on a transactional basis.

So how do you get a product into the North American Commercial Interiors Exhibit? Reach out to Rob Kirkbride at rob@bellow.press or Stewart Brown at s.brown@indyfrt.com for any questions you might have about the event.

International firms want your products, but they have to know your brand to specify them.

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In brief, the SOLAS Rules from the IMO state that, effective July 1 2016, ocean freight carriers worldwide will be prohibited from loading a container aboard vessels in 162 countries worldwide unless the shipper has provided the carrier with the verified gross mass (VGM) of the container. The VGM must be provided to the carrier either digitally or signed and noted on the bill of lading prior to vessel loading.

How is the new SOLAS Rule being implemented for US export shipments with effect from July 1 2016?

With a few exceptions, as it stands today the standard rules as published by the shipping lines require their receipt from the shipper of a certified VGM prior to the container arriving in to port for onward shipment, otherwise cost may be incurred for delay and/or port handling. Currently the VGM should be determined using either Method 1 or 2 as per our previous message on the subject and remains the responsibility of the shipper as per the B/L.

What, if anything, has changed ?

With just days before the SOLAS container weight rule takes effect, ports, marine terminals and container lines are coming closer to creating a system that will use pre-existing weighing processes to alleviate the burden on U.S. exporters. Regulators have given the go-ahead that allows a group of six East and Gulf coast ports and 19 ocean carriers to develop a common strategy for using existing weighing processes that satisfy federal regulations to meet the new international rule, and with multiple shipping lines backing the approach and the head of the Federal Maritime Commission urging the industry to embrace the same path, more announcements from terminals and carriers are expected before the rule takes effect on Friday.
In fact, a number of shipping lines have today confirmed that they will receive the certified scaled weight electronically from the terminal, and this will be used as the VGM.

As a shipper, do I still need to ensure that a VGM is correctly submitted on my behalf ?

Yes, until we have clear confirmation otherwise – the new rule’s rollout is just days away, but guidance from operating ports, carriers, terminal operators and nation states has been variable and prone to change with little or no notice.

What happens next ?

We believe that the process, standards and responsibilities for the implementation for the VGM rule under SOLAS rule will become less arduous to the commercial shipper over the next few days, weeks and months but would recommend close compliance with current methodology in the meantime until such time as any new regulations are finalised.We will continue to keep you updated on developments, and please be assured that we will work with everyone on a case by case basis to ensure that shipments are in compliance with the new rulings, and avoid unnecessary cost or delay on export.

In the meantime, please do not hesitate to let us know if we can help in any way !

We are pleased to bring you with our compliments, and courtesy of workspace at INDEX, the January 2016 Ventures-ME report on Construction and Interiors within the GCC region, with sector and country specific analysis of activity within 2015 and expected for 2016, including named project spend.

With overall market statistics and named project information, the report once again provides unique detail on the commercial, education and healthcare fit out opportunities available to North American companies in the Middle East region.

An extract from the overall conclusion of the Report confirms as follows :

The GCC’s fit out industry has its hands full heading into 2016 due to heightened construction activity, and the completion of structural works on large-scale. Fit out operations have evolved in line with industry changes, and modern fit out designs and practices are transitioning to suit international standards. This evolution can be attributed to the rapid globalisation ambitions of local GCC markets such as the UAE and Qatar.

As sustainability has become a major issue, the fit out industry has experienced increased pressure to implement environmentally-responsible practices.

Despite the slump in oil prices, the GCC building construction and interiors market is clearly set for a sustained upward stint over the next few years.

Some highlights include :
– The GCC interiors and fit out spend in the Commercial Sector is expected to increase from US$ 1,150 million in 2015 to US$ 1,168 million in 2016.
– All GCC countries are likely to register an upward trend in 2016 in terms of interior and fit outs spend except for Saudi Arabia.
– The interiors and fit out spend in the UAE Commercial Sector alone is likely to increase from US$ 328 million in 2015 to US$ 350 million in 2016.

This year’s traditional bet between the Chicago Bears fans at Independent and the fans of division rivals Packers for once did not go to plan for their Green Bay based furniture clients.

Whilst in the final analysis the Green Bay Packers finished the season almost winning the division, and the Chicago Bears ended up in last place, the Thanksgiving Day game between the two teams did not go well for Green Bay !

As a result, Green Bay Packers fan Beth Hassler of Axess International fulfilled the terms of the wager by wearing Bears team gear and allowing the picture to be posted here.

Sorry Beth – I hope they let you back in to Lambeau Field after this picture is made public

For once, the Bears fans at Independent are looking forward to doing it all again next season !

According to a new study, published online in the International Journal of Epidemiology on Oct. 9, standing at your desk may be no better than sitting, and that’s because it’s the being still that has the negative impact on your health. (Maybe it’s time to replace your standing desk with a treadmill desk.)

For the study, the researchers monitored the behavior and health of 3,720 men and 1,412 women over the course of 16 years. Beginning in 1985, the London-based volunteers recorded how many hours a week they spent sitting.

At the end of the 16-year period, the researchers tallied the hours and then checked the National Health Service Central Registry and determined that 450 of the participants had died. But the researchers found no correlation between time spent sitting and mortality.

The researchers concluded that sitting itself won’t kill you. Rather, a sedentary lifestyle in general may be what’s harmful to your health.

“Research is not black and white, and if a single study finds X or Y that doesn’t mean that this is the truth we should all go along with,” Dr. Emmanuel Stamatakis, associate professor at the University of Sydney in Australia and a co-author of the study, said in an email. “The recent study findings are in disagreement with the rest of the literature and there must be a reason for this.”

Courtesy of Adrian Gonzalez – http://talkinglogistics.com/

Almost five years ago, UPS introduced the general public to logistics when it launched its “We [Heart] Logistics” ad campaign, which helped raise public awareness about the logistics industry — and helped my family and friends better understand what I do for a living.

This past Sunday, UPS launched a new ad campaign with the slogan “United Problem Solvers,” which according to the press release, “communicates the company’s unique capabilities to solve problems for all customers, ranging from small businesses to the largest global enterprises.”

UPS wants people and businesses to think differently about the company and what it can offer, beyond “just thinking of our capabilities of making shipments from point A to point B,” said Maureen Healy, vice president of customer communications. It’s a goal shared by most third-party logistics providers (3PLs): getting customers to think of them from a broader, more strategic perspective.

But it’s an ongoing challenge, as this comment by Alda Abbracciamento, worldwide managing director at advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather, who worked with UPS on the campaign, underscores:

“It’s very hard to break through to have people think differently about UPS, because they think they know what they need to know about UPS. While very well-known, we’ve got to provide additional meaning to that.”

I would argue that the challenge starts internally: getting a 3PL and its employees to think differently about their business, a challenge I wrote about last March in 3PLs, What Business Are You In?

What I like most about this new UPS ad campaign is that the company took a step back and asked itself that very question — What business are we in? — and came up with several new answers, which it communicates in this video:

We’re in the “Pushing what’s possible” business

We’re in the “How do we get this startup off the ground?” business

We’re in the “Taking your business global” business

We’re in the problem-solving business

When you ask the “What business are we in?” question and think it through, you’ll likely find new answers, which open doors to new opportunities and value propositions. As I wrote last March:

Yes, 3PLs provide customers with “multiple logistics services” like transportation management and warehousing, but they are also in the business of providing (among other things)…

Thought leadership and advice — “Tell me something I don’t already know” — so that customers can make smarter and faster decisions about their supply chain networks, strategy, and practices.

Risk management capabilities to help customers minimize or eliminate supply chain risks, and more importantly, to help them recover from supply chain disruptions faster and with less impact.

And when it comes to shippers, they have to stop putting 3PLs in a box. In the past, you had a box for freight forwarder, a box for broker, a box for warehouse operator, and so on. Over the years, service providers have busted out of those boxes — via mergers and acquisitions, new business models, and new product development — to pursue new growth opportunities, and to provide manufacturers and retailers with more complete, “end-to-end” supply chain solutions. So, put aside your existing biases and assumptions, stop putting 3PLs in a box, and focus on the question that matters the most when defining your supply chain strategies and initiatives: What are our desired outcomes?

I do have a problem (pun intended) with the new ad campaign: it suggests that problem solving is the sole focus of supply chain and logistics. It echoes the perception that supply chain and logistics is just about cost reduction and management. But we all know that supply chain and logistics is also about opportunity making, and about driving top-line growth, capturing market share, and improving customer satisfaction. UPS even says so at the end of the video — “[We’re] ready to help you solve problems while they’re still called opportunities.”

I hope UPS promotes the opportunities part of the message too, and I have just the song for them to consider: Opportunities by the Pet Shop Boys, and my favorite lyrics from the song:

Oh, there’s a lot of opportunitiesif you know when to take themYou know there’s a lot of opportunitiesif there aren’t, you can make them(Make or break them)

So, go ahead UPS and other 3PLs, solve problems, but make opportunities too.

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